Category: Nonfiction

(by Ross Perlin) The multilingual nature of NYC is obvious to anyone who’s been here, but before reading this book I didn’t really grasp the full extent of the city’s linguistic diversity: over seven hundred languages are spoken here (out of an estimated total of about 7000 languages in the whole world), including a number…

(by Arundhati Roy) The 9 chapters in this book are a mix of essays and lectures, and some of them can be repetitive: some lectures cover the same ground and discuss the same facts, sometimes using the same phrases. I thought chapters 6 and 7 (“Intimations of an Ending” and “The Graveyard Talks Back”) were…

(by Joseph Mitchell) The six pieces in this book were originally published in The New Yorker between 1944 and 1959, and all of them have something to do with various maritime industries in and around New York. As Lucy Sante notes in her foreword, these pieces were published at a time when “the harbor and…

(by Lisa Mintz Messinger) I read this book because a) I didn’t know a whole lot about Georgia O’Keeffe’s art and b) my husband has been friends with the author’s son since 7th grade, and when we went to the author’s memorial service back in December, someone read a passage from this aloud and it…

(edited by Michael Lewis) This collection of eight essays (most of which were originally published in The Washington Post in 2024 and were later collected in book form) was a book club pick, and I liked it but am not sure how much I’ll ultimately retain from it—though that might be a me problem. Almost…

(by Ryan Goldberg) I really liked this book about bird watching in NYC, though I am not a birder myself. (I think I’ve been on exactly one bird-watching walk in my life, in Prospect Park circa 2005 or 2006—and while I remember that we definitely saw a golden-crowned kinglet, I don’t remember anything else we…

(by Jeanette Winterson) This book is partly a memoir, partly a work of literary criticism, partly a reflection on the world and its problems, and partly a retelling of some of the stories from One Thousand and One Nights. I think the retellings were my favorite aspect of the book, though there were other things…

(by Val McDermid) This is a very writerly and very Scottish book about winter: McDermid talks about how she looks at bare tree branches in the winter as she works on her latest novel, and how she takes walks and works through plot and dialogue in her head, and also about going “guising” (like trick-or-treating…

(by Nick Hornby) Nick Hornby writes a column for The Believer called “Stuff I’ve Been Reading,” and periodically those columns are collected and released in book form. This is the second of these books that I’ve read, and it definitely makes want to go back to the beginning and read the ones that I missed.…